Plot

Summaries

After polio threatens his political career in the early 1920s, Franklin D. Roosevelt desperately searches for a cure to his newly acquired disease, hoping to regain the use of his legs. He learns of a promising spa in Warm Springs, Ga., and travels there, only to find it dilapidated. Determined to overcome polio, Roosevelt invests in the spa's revitalization and sets about recovering, aided by the support of his wife and physical therapist.

A look at Franklin D. Roosevelt's pre-presidency days, from his being diagnosed with polio one year after his unsuccessful bid for the White House as presidential nominee James Cox's running mate, through his rehabilitation in Warm Springs, Ga., to his nomination of Al Smith for Democratic Presidential candidate in 1928.

Following an early and promising political career, Franklin D. Roosevelt is stricken with polio in 1921 at 39 years of age. This film follows his struggle with his paralysis, the refuge he took in an obscure and run-down Georgia health spa, and the family pressure to return to public life and politics. Perhaps the most significant battle he fought with the stigma of paralysis was not in the eyes of others but in his own mind.